Wednesday, 19 July 2017

Chapter One: Pride and Shame, A Dragon Age Fanfic

She woke up
with a groan. Every jolt the dwarf Tegrin's ox-cart gave along every inch of
the road seemed to go straight to her bones. The novelty of being outside the
Tower for the first time since she had been brought there had worn off pretty
quickly. The Tower was comfortable.
The road was most definitely the opposite.

She brushed
the locks of thick blonde hair that had fallen across her forehead away. It was
nearing dusk, so she had slept for an hour at least. Given that she had not
been sleeping at nights for a while now, these stolen naps were like gold.

Duncan had
found the dwarf merchant heading towards Denerim within a day of their leaving
from the Lake Calenhad docks and, in exchange for a few silvers, he had agreed
to take them along for as long the road was on the route to Ostagar. If the
dwarf had felt any surprise at seeing a Grey Warden travel with an elf mage, he
hadn't shown it. He was a man of very few words, was Tegrin the dwarf.

Not that
Neria minded. In her present state of mind, all she wanted was peace, quiet,
and an opportunity to escape. Or that was what she had wanted until the Fade-dream she had just had.

“Are
you all right there, miss?”

The old
woman who had asked the question was a fellow-passenger. Tegrin was the kind of
man who would not pay for mercenary guards to accompany his caravan if he could
afford it, so he carried passengers who had their own guards instead. Neria
travelled with Duncan, as formidable a man as you could hope to find in
Ferelden, and the old woman travelled with her son, Cogren, who was tall and
broad, and by virtue of being called up to join the military at Ostagar, was
also a soldier, as far as that went, though you could not really scrub the farm
boy out of him. He was to accompany his mother to Denerim first, though, so
they would only travel together for another night; it was on foot from there,
unless they could find someone else to tag along with.

“I’m fine,”
Neria tried to give a little smile.

“You were
sobbing in your sleep, miss,” the woman persisted. “You have been for some days
now.”

“Dreams,”
muttered Neria. “It’s nothing.”

Now that was
a lie. A big one. It was not nothing.
But the old woman had no way of knowing Neria was a mage, or that she was on
the verge of being put to death when Duncan saved her life by recruiting her,
or that it was her very best friend in the world who had put her in that
situation to begin with.

How long had
it been? Ten days or twelve? Days melted into each other under the open sky,
with no lessons to learn, no experiments to conduct, no usher to call for the
apprentices to go to bed, and no men for her to fuck senseless. It did not
matter how many exactly, except that she had been that many days suffering this
torment of anger and resentment, and all because of Jowan.

It had been
a bitter pill to swallow, Jowan’s betrayal. She had trusted the man implicitly
when he swore he had nothing to do with blood magic, that the accusations were
unjust, and that all he wanted was her help with a simple thing so he could
escape with his life and live quietly on a farm with the woman he loved, the
fat cow named Lily.

After all,
he was Jowan. The lad who had welcomed her to the apprentice quarters with a
ready smile that first night when she had been scared and aching to see a
friendly face. The boy who had been happy to share his knowledge with her as
she took her first steps into the study of magic. The comforting arm on her
shoulder when she had cried herself to sleep, hating every moment, missing her
old life in the Denerim Alienage. The man who had been delighted when she had made
rapid progress in her studies, surpassing him, the man who had always been
ready with a joke and words of comfort when she had doubted the Harrowing would
be too much for her.

The man who
should have been her man. Not Lily’s. But no, for all the men she had seduced, she
could not count Jowan among them.

Well, you certainly fucked me over when you killed
those Templar with blood magic – no one wanted to believe I was not complicit
after that, except Irving and Duncan.

On second
thoughts, Duncan probably didn’t care whether she was innocent or not, he just
wanted to recruit a mage to his cause, and Irving would have let her get away
with anything; she had been his favourite student by some distance. “Neria is
the most outrageously talented apprentice I have seen pass these doors in
thirty years,” Irving had said about her once. Jowan had heard him say it, to a
visiting friend from the Circle at Kirkwall, and come right over and related it
to Neria. The happiness in Jowan’s voice had seemed so genuine, so unselfish,
that she had felt certain that he and she would end up together eventually - whenever he came to his senses and stopped rebuffing her and mouthing that
nonsense about ‘we are better off as friends’.

“When we
stop for dinner, let me make you a little potion from some herbs I have,” the
old woman said, and Neria snapped back into the present. “It will help you to
sleep.”

“You’re an
alchemist?” asked Neria, trying to keep the surprise out of her voice. It was
not magic, exactly, but the making of potions was a job requiring a high
amount of skill.

“I have
dabbled a little,” she chuckled, and nodded her head. “Now we must hope my
idiot son has not lost the ingredients.”

Neria smiled
back, but her mind was elsewhere again. She wondered when she had lost Jowan.
It would have been easy to blame it on that simpering fool Lily, but Neria knew
that would be unfair. She and Jowan had begun to drift apart long before that.
She wondered if there was more to his loving Lily – a chaste acolyte of the
Chantry - than met the eye. Had he been a prude? It was unusual among mages,
who, almost in reaction to the Templars strict vows of celibacy, tended to
adhere to a more relaxed moral code. She herself, of course, had smashed the
code to smithereens long ago.

“The man
you’re travelling with – is he your father?”

“Who? What?
No,” said Neria, and bent the cowl of her cloak back to show her elf-ears, long
and sharp. Most people could tell even without looking at the ears, really, elves
tended to be slightly smaller in stature and have more delicate features,
though that was somewhat true of the half-elven children as well. The ears were
unique to her race though, and marked her out as one of the lesser people of
Thedas. She reflected that she should not have shown them to the old woman.
People tended to assume…

“Oh, I
understand,” the old woman tittered.

“We are Grey
Wardens,” said Neria sharply. “I’ve been recruited to fight the Blight.”

That made
the crone’s eyes open wide. For the most part, the people of Thedas looked down
upon elvenkind. They were not quite ‘people’. The men were seen as drunks, good
for nothing but servile tasks, and the women, well elf women were often very
attractive, which made them very popular whores, though no human would
contemplate ever marrying one. The only category of people who were less
fortunate were probably mages, who were feared and hated outright for the
perceived danger of being prone to possession by fade-demons.

Neria, of
course, was an elf and a mage. Talk
about winning the game of chance right there.

“Your son
did not march with the rest of the men?” she asked, wearily.

“Bann Teagan
allowed our farms to be harvested,” the crone said, “he said there would be a
Blight of hunger if we did not bring in our crops. Cogren is my only son, and
so we waited until the wheat was cut and sold.”

“I can
understand that, yes,” said Neria.

“If I may
ask, Miss, are the Grey Wardens not supposed to be mighty warriors?”

“So the
legends say,” agreed Neria.

“You seem a
little young to…”

“You know
how it is with elves,” said Neria, “you never can tell how old we are.”

The fact
was, she was young. At seventeen, she
was one of the youngest in the Circle at Ferelden to graduate from
apprenticeship to being a Mage. But one never knew how people would react in
the outside world to being told the person they were travelling with was cursed
with magic, let alone that she was relatively inexperienced at handling it.
Duncan had advised her to remain inconspicuous as far as possible and try to
hide being a mage.

“Cogren
wanted to join the Wardens too. Maybe he will get a chance when he reaches
Ostagar, if the battle is not over by then. He’s a fine warrior, he is. He once
beat down old Bilker the miller in a wrestling…”

As the crone
droned on, Neria allowed herself to drift back to her days at the Tower. It was
not like her to hide her power, any more than it was to hide her beauty under
an ugly cowl as she had done since getting in the ferry that took her and Duncan
across Lake Calenhad. She was used to being looked down upon all her life, which meant that anything
that gave her an advantage was to be used and exploited - whether it was her
undoubtedly prodigious magical talent, her status as the favoured student of
the First Enchanter, or her considerable physical attractiveness.

She had
enjoyed, with almost diabolical derision, seeing the boys who had heaped
insults on ten-year-old Neria for being an elf when she had first come to tower
struggle to concentrate on their studies or even sit comfortably when the
fifteen-year old Neria cavorted past them in little more than her smallclothes.
She had enjoyed the glares of jealousy on the faces of the women who used to
beat her when they were girls as she gleefully preened before the mirror,
letting down her dark blonde hair, standing naked, her dark skin glowing even
in the dimly-lighted apprentice quarters.

Jowan didn't
like it when she did that. Jowan, who had fought to make boys stop insulting
her when they were children. Jowan, who would take her to Wynne for healing
when he saw the bruises that the girls had given her.

He used to get angry, as would Wynne. They would both ask her to tell them the names of
those who had done it to her, but Neria always smiled beatifically and refused.
What names would she give, anyway? She was the only female elf apprentice in the tower. Every other apprentice
had, at some time or the other, treated her as something less than human.
Except, of course, Jowan. He would tell her it wasn't 'fitting' that she carried
on the way she did, that her dalliances with the male apprentices would not
stay hidden forever, that Irving's protection would count for little if Knight-Commander
Gregoir caught her fucking – ‘making love’ would have been a gross
misrepresentation of what Neria did - with his Templars, that even her
formidable magical powers would not protect her if all the other apprentices
ganged up against her.

But it had
been too much fun.

Flirting
outrageously with Cullen the Templar, that poor virginal boy, watching him twist in his plate armour, often running away when she, little tiny Neria,
looked up at the Templar in his massive armour, batted her lashes and
whispered, "Wouldn't you like to find an empty room somewhere?"

Lighting a
fire under the bath with a snap of her fingers and casually disrobing before it
while the other girls huddled into their furs in the winters when the Lake
around them froze over. The long luxurious baths while she soaped her dark
Rivaini skin even as the other girls, who she knew could not light a controlled
fire if their lives depended on it, struggled with their ice-cold water, but could not
bring themselves to ask her help.

Those
meaningless little trysts with the boys in those sheltered, shady nooks that
seemed to have been placed around the Tower for no other purpose.

Enjoying
seeing those same boys who had laughed about her being brought to the tower
helpless with desire as she coolly dictated to them what they could and could
not do. Allowing them their release while she kept a bored, almost
disinterested look on her face just to torment them into trying harder.

The
exquisite look of gratification on their faces when they finally released their
seed for her – it made her laugh. It was her turn to insult them then, of
course. Payback for what they had said to her, in a way.

"Finished
already? You could have waited until I woke up at least," she had said to one.
And to another, who was leaning against the wall, trembling with exhaustion and
pleasure while she knelt before him, "What? Did you miss your aim or
something?" she had said, in reference to his having spilled himself all
over the floor.

Not that she
didn't derive any joy from these little sessions, of course – she did, but she
would be damned before she let the men she was with know that. Jowan had never
come out and said he did not want her to do any of that, that if she did, he
would be with her, give her the love she so craved from him. She would have
stopped, if he had. Surely he had
feelings for her too. He must have had once, Neria told herself, for all that he
had called her 'sister'.

She had
begun to listen to Jowan – she had consciously decided to 'clean up her act' as
her Harrowing came near. Neria had it all planned out – once she was a full-fledged
mage, she would come out and confess her feelings to Jowan. They could not get
married, as such, but mages co-habiting as a couple in all but name was not
uncommon as long as they did not have children. Such fond hopes! But they had
kept her going - well, at least until Lily the virginal initiate, white-skinned
and black-haired had come to the Tower’s chapel.

That was
when she and Jowan had actually started spending less time together. With her Harrowing
drawing close she had begun work in earnest on her fire and lightening spells
and started spending more time with Senior Enchanter Leborah, the only Elf
among the Circle's upper echelons. She wondered if that was around the same
time that he'd started to learn about Blood Magic. Ironic, that being with a
Chantry initiate, knowing the forbidden nature of their bond should have been
the impetus that drove him to turn his back on everything that he had learned
and take to practicing a form of magic that was evil, intrinsically evil.

"Will
you take something warm, my dear?"

Neria
snapped out of her reverie. The cart had stopped, and the old woman had asked
the question at least thrice without a response.

“Yes, yes
please, I think I must have fallen asleep,” she said.

They set up
a camp and a fire, and Neria watched as the old woman threw the herbs and water
into a pot. They were having trouble keeping the fire going, and it was getting
cold now. Neria could have lit up a perfect campfire as easily as snapping her fingers,
but that would have militated rather too strongly against Duncan’s
instructions. Her staff was kept wrapped in a cloth with the rest of their
gear and she wore a thick fur robe over the flimsy dresses she favoured for the
freedom of movement and lightness they afforded which was so essential to quick
spell-casting. That, and the fact that they showed off exactly how magnificent
her body was.

"Thank
you," she said, gratefully accepting the cup of tea she was offered.

"We'll
be camping here for the night," announced Tegrin, stroking his beard,

"and after
that, I make for Denerim, so anyone heading south will have to part company in
the morning."

"There
are bandits in these parts, Tegrin," said Duncan, "if you mean to
camp here, we shall have to keep watch through the night."

"Yes,
well, you're the Grey Wardens," the dwarf said dismissively.

"Somehow
I thought it would fall to us," Duncan said with the wry smile that she
had seen on his face so often already. He was a striking man, his skin nearly
as dark as Neria’s own, and with a glossy black beard and long hair that he
tied in a bun behind his head. A few wrinkles and streaks of grey in the beard
let her peg his age at closer forty than thirty. Irving had introduced him to
her as the Commander of the Grey Wardens in Ferelden – it had been the day
after she had passed the Harrowing and attained the rank of a full-fledged Mage
of the Circle. She had spoken to him a little, curious about the rumours of a
Blight starting in the south, and flirted a little too, overtures he had gently
rebuffed. The Wardens were an order of Knights spanning almost every country in
Thedas, with a headquarters far away in the Anderfels, their sole mission being
to stand against the darkspawn wherever they should emerge. They also had the
right to recruit anyone to their cause, whether a condemned murderer or a King –
a right they used rarely and only in extraordinary cases, for as Duncan told
her, it was a power best used sparingly.

He had used
it to save her. When she, Jowan and Lily had emerged from the Tower storehouse
with the stolen vial of Jowan’s blood, retrieved so that he could escape
without being tracked down, Duncan and Irving had stood there with the
Templars. Even as Neria had tried to protest their innocence, or at least repentance,
the Templars moved in to strike them down and Jowan had reacted with extreme
force, cutting his hand and turning the energy released into a wave of force
that left them all prone on the floor, with two of the Templar dead.

That was the
last she had seen of Jowan.

In a daze,
she saw Knight Commander Gregoir clap irons on Lily and move to do the same to
her. She had held out her hand helplessly, knowing that it was over, her
dreams, her life as she knew it was over, that only death or the Rite of
Tranquility awaited her, when Duncan’s voice had rung out:

“I’ll take
her for the Grey Wardens.”

She blushed,
hoping it did not show on her cheek. She had not really thought about what that
meant, the fact that he had used that power to save her when he could have recruited a much more powerful mage, a more experienced
one, like Uldred, or Irving himself, or even Wynne.

She gave a
little sigh as Cogren left to make his tent and another for his mother. Tegrin was taking the oxen to graze and Duncan
sipped some brandy from a stone bottle quietly. She had not slept at night
anyway. She dreamed of Jowan all too often, reliving those moments, breaking
into the vaults, the creatures she had had to fight down there, spiders and
animated skeletons and possessed suits of armour…

“Why me,
Duncan?” she asked. “Why did you save me?”

He squinted
towards her.

“I don’t
know,” he said. “I saw a younger girl about to be pilloried for the crime of
loyalty to a friend and I thought the Grey Wardens could do with some of that.
Loyalty is all we have, young Surana. Loyalty and commitment. The Blight,
unchecked, devastates everything. It renders the land fallow, it makes the people
into ghouls and the animals in dread manifestations of themselves. It is an
evil that needs to be fought, and only we – only we can truly end it.”

“What does
that mean?”

“You’ll know
when the time is right,” he responded, and then walked away to put up his tent,
leaving her pouting.

She discarded
the fur as she moved closer to the fire. It had been suffocating her anyway.
Warmth and a reason to stay awake. That was worth something.

[Anything you might recognise from playing Dragon Age: Origins is (c) BioWare. This work is not intended to earn any profit or make any money.]NEXT CHAPTER - TO OSTAGAR

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About Me

Percy Slacker was bitten by Schrodinger’s Cat as a child, and has since then combined a deep fear of cats with an
abiding conviction that he both exists and does not exist at the same
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He lives in Mumbai with his family, his book collection and a firm
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